1. Field of the Invention
Embodiments of the present invention generally relate to highly available fault tolerant server networks, and more particularly, to a method and apparatus for providing in-memory checkpoint services within a distributed two-phase transaction.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modern computer networks generally comprise a plurality of user computers (referred to herein as client computers or clients) connected to one another and to a computer server via a communications network. To provide redundancy and high availability of computer services provided by a computer server, multiple computer servers may be arranged in a cluster of nodes forming a server cluster. The application software in such systems are executed in a distributed manner providing various services to many client computers. Many of these so-called enterprise applications must be highly available and therefore cannot tolerate downtime, either planned or unplanned. Whenever a failure does occur, the downtime must be as short as possible. To reduce the downtime and improve the process used to restart a failed application on another server, known as a failover process, applications periodically save critical memory and file state information to persistent storage using a technique known as checkpointing. The so-called checkpoint data is used to reinitialize the application whenever the application is required to be restarted on the same or another node within the computer network. The checkpoint data is stored in a common storage volume that is accessible to both the failed server and the new node. Though the process checkpointing improves the application's failover response, the technique requires shared storage between applications and processors such that the information that is stored for one application from one server can be accessed and used by another server that is used in the failover process.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for a method and apparatus for improving the availability and failover response in a computer network.